Thoughts and experiences from an enterprise software architect.
This is a personal weblog by Jorgen Thelin, a Senior Program Manager for Windows Live Identity Services at Microsoft in Redmond.
The opinions expressed here represent my own views and not those of my current, prior or future employer(s).
Tim Bray makes a very true statement on his weblog posting about "Web Services Theory and Practice" (emphasis added)
The Standards Process
This essay is about theory and practice, and we ought to have learned by now that standards are terrific when applied to proven industry practice but high-risk in the domain of theory and science. SQL and XML were both exercises in writing down something that had already been proven to work.When committees get together either in an informal cabal or an official standards process, and go about inventing new technologies, the results are usually pretty bad. ODA (Never heard of it? Exactly); OSI Networking; W3C XML Schemas. The list goes on and on.
Just as a camel is a horse designed by committee, as Tim points out it is similarly important to take things to standards organizations that are more than just theories. That's exactly what Microsoft is doing through the workshop process - knocking the glitches and interop bugs out of the WS-* specs before sending them to a standards org.
One of my favourite sayings is "the only real test for software is production deployment", and if we apply this principle to the world of web services specs then the only real test that a spec is right is proven multi-vendor interop.
Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Jorgen Thelin. All rights reserved.
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